Fathom vs Plausible vs Clerion: which privacy analytics is best? (2026)

Clerion Research Team4 October 202611 min read

Fathom vs Plausible comes down to sites and data location. As of October 2026, Plausible is cheaper for one small site ($9 a month for 10k pageviews) and EU-hosted, while Fathom costs $15 a month but covers 100k pageviews across 50 sites. Of the two, only Plausible groups AI assistant traffic for you.

Isometric slab of site tiles with one lit, tagged Fathom vs Plausible and 50 sites vs 1

Fathom vs Plausible comes down to how many sites you run and where you want your data. As of October 2026, Plausible is cheaper for one small site ($9 a month for 10k pageviews) and is EU-hosted and open source. Fathom costs $15 a month but covers 100k pageviews across 50 sites. Neither one shows you JavaScript errors.

Both tools are cookieless and both skip the consent banner, so the choice is closer than most comparison pages admit. A few of those pages also have the facts wrong. One 2026 comparison says Plausible starts at $19. Another calls it freemium. Plausible's own pricing page lists a $9 Starter plan and a 30-day trial, with no free tier. Everything below comes from each vendor's own pages, opened in October 2026.

How do Fathom, Plausible and Clerion compare on price and features?

Plausible wins on entry price and openness, Fathom wins on traffic and site allowance per dollar, and Clerion is the one built around AI traffic and errors. All three are cookieless. The table uses each tool's entry plan as published in October 2026, so check the pricing pages before you buy, because tiers move.

Plausible Fathom Clerion
Entry price $9/mo (Starter) $15/mo (Starter) From $14/mo
What that covers 10k pageviews, 1 site 100k pageviews, 50 sites See pricing
Free trial 30 days, no card 7 days, card required 14 days
Cookies / consent banner No cookies, no banner No cookies, no banner No cookies, no banner
Where data lives Made and hosted in the EU Canadian company, EU traffic routed through European-owned infrastructure EU
AI assistant channel Yes, "AI Assistants" channel Not listed; AI visits show as referrers and UTMs Yes, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Copilot
Funnels Business plan ($19/mo) and up Not listed; events and revenue tracking on all plans Goals with the step where people drop out
JS errors and page speed Not listed Not listed Yes
Google Analytics import Yes Yes (GA4 importer) Yes
Self-hosting Yes, Community Edition (AGPLv3) No No
Data retention 3 years (5 on Business) Forever while you're a customer See pricing

Sources: Plausible pricing, Fathom pricing, Fathom features.

Is Plausible or Fathom cheaper for a small startup?

Plausible is cheaper if you run one site under 10k pageviews a month: $9 against Fathom's $15. Fathom gets cheaper once you add sites or traffic, because its $15 plan already covers 100k pageviews and 50 sites, while Plausible's Starter covers one site and Growth stops at three.

Here's a worked case. Say you ship small AI tools in public and you've got 12 of them live, each pulling around 5k pageviews a month. That's 60k pageviews over 12 domains.

  1. Fathom: the $15 Starter plan holds all of it. 60k is under the 100k cap, and 12 domains sit well inside the 50 included sites. Extra sites come in packs of 50 for $10 a month if you ever need them.
  2. Plausible: Starter is one site. Growth goes up to 3 sites, Business up to 10. Twelve domains puts you past Business and into a custom Enterprise quote, per Plausible's plan list.

Flip it around. One product, one marketing site, 8k pageviews a month: Plausible Starter at $9 does the job, and you save $72 a year over Fathom.

Spikes are handled kindly by both. Fathom says it will "never turn your analytics off for occasional traffic spikes." Plausible says the same in its subscription docs: no extra charge for a one-off spike, and only after two straight months over the limit does it ask you to upgrade.

Which one shows ChatGPT and other AI traffic?

Plausible does, out of the box. As of October 2026 it groups ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot into an "AI Assistants" channel and keeps AI crawlers out of the count. Fathom's features page lists no AI channel, so you read chatgpt.com in the referrer list and add the assistants up yourself.

That matters more each quarter. SE Ranking's June 2026 study of 101,574 sites put AI assistants at 0.32% of all web traffic in 2026, up from 0.02% in 2024. Small, but growing fast, and ChatGPT sent 74.78% of it. A separate study of 6.77 million LLM sessions across 166 GA4 properties, reported by Search Engine Land in July 2026, found ChatGPT behind 92.4% of trackable LLM referrals, with Claude sessions up 64x from November 2024 to May 2026.

Two caveats apply to every tool on this list.

  • Apps hide the referrer. Seer Interactive's guide, updated June 2026, notes that links tapped inside mobile apps often lose referral data and land in Direct. Treat any AI number as a floor.
  • UTMs help. ChatGPT has added utm_source=chatgpt to more of its links since June 2025, so a tool that reads UTM tags, Fathom included, can still catch some of it. Fathom's own UTM docs say why: many referrers strip data, which it calls dark social.

If you build an AI product, this is the row in the table we'd weigh most. Your buyers ask assistants for tools now. You want to see that channel without building a filter.

No. Neither sets cookies, so neither needs a consent banner for analytics. Plausible says it uses "no cookies, no persistent identifiers." Fathom says it "doesn't use cookies" and is GDPR, CCPA, ePrivacy and PECR compliant. Your other scripts, like chat widgets or ad pixels, may still need one.

That last part trips people up. Swapping Google Analytics for a cookieless tool removes the banner only if analytics was the reason you had one. If you also load an ad pixel or an embedded video player that drops cookies, the banner stays.

Weight is the other half. Plausible says its script is 2.5KB, against 135KB gzipped for GA4, and that GA plus Tag Manager plus a consent tool can push past 285KB. Fathom doesn't publish a size on its features page. It just says the script is small and loads async. You'll see a "~25KB" figure for Fathom on some third-party pages, but we couldn't confirm it from Fathom, so don't lean on it.

Where is my data stored with Fathom vs Plausible?

Plausible is made and hosted in the EU. Fathom is a Canadian company that routes EU visitor traffic through European-owned infrastructure and relies on Canada's EU adequacy decision. If you need the data on your own servers, only Plausible offers that, through its self-hosted Community Edition.

For most founders both pass the bar. The difference shows up when a customer's legal team sends a vendor questionnaire asking where data is processed. "Hosted in the EU" is a one-line answer. "Canadian company, EU traffic processed in the EU" is also fine, it just takes a second line.

Self-hosting is the thing only Plausible gives you. Community Edition is free under AGPLv3, but it drops marketing funnels, user journeys, ecommerce revenue goals and SSO. It also ships basic bot filtering only, while the paid cloud blocks roughly 32,000 data center IP ranges. So the free version is free in money, not in hours. You patch the server, and you get updates about twice a year.

Which is best if I run several sites or side projects?

Fathom. Every plan includes at least 50 sites, and the $15 entry tier covers 100k pageviews across all of them. Plausible counts sites per plan: 1 on Starter, 3 on Growth, 10 on Business. If you launch a new tool every month, Fathom's model fits that habit better.

Plausible makes up some of the gap with a consolidated view on Business, which rolls several sites into one dashboard. Fathom has saved views, milestones you can pin on a chart for a launch, and a Google Search Console hookup. If you mostly live in one product and want deeper reports on it, Plausible's Business tier, with funnels, custom properties and an API, gives more depth for $19.

What don't Fathom and Plausible track?

Neither lists JavaScript error tracking or page-speed monitoring on the pricing and feature pages we checked in October 2026. Both count visits, sources, pages and goals well. Neither tells you that your signup button threw an error for Safari users last night, which is often the real reason a launch didn't convert.

This gap is easy to miss because both dashboards look calm when something breaks. Traffic arrives, the bounce rate creeps up, and nothing on screen says why. Say you run an AI note-taking app and a script update breaks the checkout modal on mobile. Plausible and Fathom will show fewer goal completions. They won't show the error, how many sessions hit it, or which page it lives on.

Neither tool reads your pages the way a model does, either. Whether ChatGPT can parse your title, headings and schema is a separate check from whether ChatGPT sends you visitors.

So which privacy analytics tool should I pick?

Pick Plausible if you run one to three sites, want EU hosting or open source, and want AI traffic grouped for you. Pick Fathom if you run many small sites and want one flat bill. Pick a tool that also tracks errors and page speed if conversions matter more than counts.

  1. One product, small traffic, EU-first: Plausible Starter ($9).
  2. Many side projects, one bill: Fathom Starter ($15, 50 sites).
  3. You want to self-host: Plausible Community Edition, if you'll maintain it.
  4. You need funnels: Plausible Business ($19), or a tool with goals built in.
  5. You sell an AI product and care where AI visits land and convert: a tool with an AI channel, so not Fathom as it stands today.

If that last line is you, Clerion reports ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Copilot as their own channel, groups script errors by page with a likely fix, and has no cookies or banner, from $14 a month with 14 days free. There's also a side-by-side with Fathom.

Do this tonight

  1. Count your live domains and last month's pageviews. That pair alone picks your cheapest plan from the table.
  2. Open your current analytics, search referrers for chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and claude.ai, and note the total. That's your AI floor.
  3. Check whether anything else on your site sets cookies before you rip out the banner.
  4. Start one trial (Plausible's needs no card) and run it next to your current tool for a week to compare counts.
  5. Import your Google Analytics history before you switch, since all three tools support it.

Frequently asked questions

Is Plausible cheaper than Fathom?

For one small site, yes. As of October 2026 Plausible Starter is $9 a month for 10k pageviews and one site, while Fathom starts at $15 a month. Fathom's $15 plan covers 100k pageviews and 50 sites, so it gets cheaper once you run several sites.

Does Fathom or Plausible need a cookie banner?

No. Neither sets cookies, so neither needs a consent banner for analytics. Other scripts on your site, such as ad pixels, chat widgets or embedded video players, may still need one.

Can Plausible or Fathom track ChatGPT traffic?

Plausible groups ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot into an AI Assistants channel automatically. Fathom lists no AI channel, so you see chatgpt.com as a referrer or utm_source=chatgpt as a UTM and add assistants up yourself.

Where does Fathom store EU data?

Fathom is a Canadian company. It says EU visitor traffic is automatically routed through European-owned infrastructure and processed in the EU, and it relies on Canada's EU adequacy decision. Plausible is made and hosted in the EU.

Can I self-host Plausible or Fathom?

Only Plausible. Its Community Edition is free under AGPLv3, but it drops funnels, user journeys, ecommerce revenue goals and SSO, has basic bot filtering only, and gets updates about twice a year. Fathom is cloud only.

Which is better for many side projects, Fathom or Plausible?

Fathom. Every Fathom plan includes at least 50 sites, and the $15 tier covers 100k pageviews across them. Plausible allows 1 site on Starter, 3 on Growth and 10 on Business, then moves to a custom Enterprise quote.

Sources

fathom vs plausibleplausiblefathom analyticsprivacy analyticscookieless analyticsai traffic

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Written from real site data by the team building Clerion. Analytics with no cookie banner and nothing to consent to. Start cookie-free. Nothing charged for 14 days.